Having only read a handful of short stories by Haruki Murakami, I don’t feel I’m in a position to make informed pronouncements about how faithfully filmmakers have adapted his work. I liked Lee Chang-dong’s Burning and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, but from what I understand they mostly used basic plot points from their source material and liberally extrapolated on the themes. I also liked Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani and had read the original short story in the New Yorker. It was quite faithful, but I liked the short story and the film for completely different reasons. Director Pierre Foldes’ take on six Murakami stories exists on a whole other level, and not just because it is animated. I’ve only read one of the stories adapted, but it seems more purposefully faithful to the original tone and meaning of the source material. What sets it apart as an adaptation is that Foldes has carefully and, for the most part, successfully combined the stories in such away as to create an integrated feature film rather than the collection of shorts that such an undertaking would normally produce. And by doing so, he more readily abides by Murakami’s appeal as a storyteller. Of course, the problem with such an approach is that it may only appeal to those who are already taken by Murakami’s peculiar literary traits. The rest of us might not be so disposed toward them.

There are two overarching plots in the film. In one, an indecisive, preternaturally uninteresting young man named Komura is taken aback when his wife, Kyoko, leaves their Tokyo home following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, saying she will never return. In the bluntest terms, she adds she has no desire to live with Komura any more, since she finds him to be nothing more than “a chunk of air.” Though Komura is depressed by this development, he basically proves her right by going about his business, interpreting his abandonment as more of an inconvenience than anything else. As the story progresses, we learn how he and Kyoko met and came together as a couple under circumstances that seem hardly ideal, which to me is a hallmark of Murakami’s stories, especially those concerning romantic love. At one point, the POV turns to Kyoko herself as she relates a story to a friend (much of the development is presented as characters telling stories to other characters) that, at first, seems to have nothing to do with Komura but, in the end, actually does. The second plotline focuses on another loser, Katagiri, who might be Komura twenty years on. In fact, they work for the same bank. Katagiri is a loan officer in charge of an account with a company that is behind in its payments and may have associations with underworld figures. As his boss is putting the screws on him to get the company to pay up, Katagiri is visited by a giant talking frog in his messy apartment. The frog says that Tokyo will be hit by a massive earthquake on a certain day and it will be caused by a giant worm. The frog plans to fight the worm and requires Katagiri’s assistance. Murakami’s naturalist style here translates as magic realist comedy, since Katagiri has no idea why a zhlub like him would be chosen to assist in what comes down in movie terms as saving the world, and it’s difficult to get a handle on whether this is an allegory for something deeper. In any case, it’s more affecting the Komura tale in that Katagiri at least is given a chance to rise above his miserable station.

Foldes reproduces Murakami’s pointedly banal dialogue effectively, matching it to a flat drawing style that makes the characters look disembodied from their surroundings. The mood is downbeat throughout, a quality that emphasizes Murakami’s sometimes off-putting approach to women’s bodies and sexual attraction. When Komura ends up sleeping with a woman he just met on an inadvertent trip to Sapporo, the encounter feels all the more surreal because Komura is such a nonentity as a fictional presence. It’s as if Murakami, and Foldes, just wanted to give the guy a break by offering him sex without the emotional work sex usually requires. Maybe that’s what Kyoko was talking about.

In English dialogue and Japanese dialogue versions. Opens July 26 in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211), Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645), Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015).

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